No More Learning

herein they utter a prophecy of
universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink.

It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with
no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller
knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness
itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected
with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as
a postulate pro tempore. This having been granted, though but in
expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the equal truth
of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all,
even of the most learned and cultivated classes. A system, the first
principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual
in man (i. e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural
consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have
never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must
in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom
the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the
imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in
great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even
as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of
living and actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man,
and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which
is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into
consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this
becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from
without. The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the
surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the
common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations
of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the
spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it
only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all
spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even
with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to
himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert of
his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which
no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a
fellow being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms,
the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the
distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding!
To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like
occasion, is honour and a good name before God and man.

The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains instances
of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic.
Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I
think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself
deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however,
they have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in a most
instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy;
namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth
scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth,
says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it
is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mutilated and
sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous errors. The deeper,
however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we
discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the philosophical
sects. The want of substantial reality in the objects of the senses,
according to the sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and
ideas, to which the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things:
the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without [49] Spinozism; the
necessary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable
with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the
Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation;
the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen,
together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena
according to Democritus and the recent philosophers--all these we shall
find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity
and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object, which from every
other point of view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of
sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures.
We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we have
drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others. J'ai trouve que
la plupart des Sectes ont raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles
avancent, mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient.

A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions
of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the
memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would
be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position therefore
must, in the first instance be demanded, and the first question will be,
by what right is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient
to make some preliminary remarks on the introduction of Postulates
in philosophy. The word postulate is borrowed from the science
of mathematics [50]. In geometry the primary construction is not
demonstrated, but postulated. This first and most simple construction in
space is the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved
in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually
changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of the point
have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there
arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of
the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow
back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does
enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the
cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at
no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction
continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and
the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the
third compounded of both. It is at once undetermined and determined;
undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself.
Geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a primary
intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence
must take its commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a
demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea.

But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is
employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry,
appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition.
Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed
from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is
the most original construction or first productive act for the inner
sense. The answer to this question depends on the direction which is
given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner sense cannot
have its direction determined by an outward object. To the original
construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me
on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line
itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it,
that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we
bring this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the
imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or
thickness. Still however this stroke is the sensuous image of
the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every
imagination to the intuition of it.

It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy
to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is
determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner
sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act
of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or
unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another
enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a
third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion
of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he reflects
on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropriety, that
the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the other. This more or
less betrays already, that philosophy in its first principles must have
a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side.
This difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. Socrates in
Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of
himself to solve the most difficult geometrical problem. Socrates drew
the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical
philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La Forge
and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the origin of our
representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and
it would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most
popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward
organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among
us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the
philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a
mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or
like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and
their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is
groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with
any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its
existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known.
The words of Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the
philosophic energy. To theoroun mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi geometrai
theorountes graphousin; all' emon mae graphousaes, theorousaes de,
uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai. With me the act of contemplation
makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating
describe lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply
contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into
existence.

The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic
capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! (E
coelo descendit, Gnothi seauton). And this at once practically and
speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or
understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of
BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative
nor merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the
coincidence of an object with a subject. (My readers have been warned
in a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the writer's,
the term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent
to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or
quicquid objicitur menti. ) For we can know that only which is true: and
the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with
the thing, of the representation with the object represented.

Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call
NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as
comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known
to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may
comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions
are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively
representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious,
the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive
knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely
of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious.
Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its
necessity.

During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are
so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two
the priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are
coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempting to explain this intimate
coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from
the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to
arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the
problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which
of them I should commence, there are two cases equally possible.

1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE HAVE TO
ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT.

The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the
objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The
subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. The conception of
nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence
making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing it. This desk
for instance would (according to our natural notions) be, though there
should exist no sentient being to look at it. This then is the problem
of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or unconscious nature as
the first, and as therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to
it, or how itself can grow into intelligence. If it should appear, that
all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the
problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of its
solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself
is founded in nature. For if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles
reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from
the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the
equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. The
necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to
intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of
the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural
phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist
in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws
of intuition and intellect. The phaenomena (the material) most wholly
disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it comes,
that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the
more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves become more
spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The
optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn
by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become
matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is
lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the
most illustrious Newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible
than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but
its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of
the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be
completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in
essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as
intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth
shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the
presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during
the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity.

This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences
with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things
existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and
as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this
tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the
one of the two poles of fundamental science.

2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW
THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE.

In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an
austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful
separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite
science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the
objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective
in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather
suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of
final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental
or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all
interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his
science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations
in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted
by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate
and real objects of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of
explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute
and scientific scepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines
itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes who
(in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave
a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined
indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the
scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in Scepticos imitabar,
qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil
quaerunt. Nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [51].
Nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper
objects, which are not as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of
education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices
which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the
philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of
truth.

Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental
presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand
originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand
remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments
(naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand lays
claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable
and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to
something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition
to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a
part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which
ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being,
should become a modification of our being) the philosopher therefore
compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice,
innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice.

The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission
of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the
philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM,
cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but
then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from
the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is
groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other
certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position,
namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature
cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as
independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the
Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the
former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only
coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own
immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office
and object of his philosophy.

If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it
is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very
account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the
realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that there exists
a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which
occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither
connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and learned
in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves
concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far
elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation
of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere
surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man
of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table,
from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which
he does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually
behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of
modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds
us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the
majority of those who dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world
was mad," exclaimed poor Lee, "and the world said, that I was mad, and
confound them, they outvoted me. "

It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the
attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than the
object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very
object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all
collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at
the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the schools know
nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar,
because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which
human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves,
and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a
better philosophy! Let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your
human nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy
made up of notions and mere logical entities.

In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this
volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions
of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according
to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato
revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus
tradita tandem in vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic furnishes
instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for
the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result,
before it has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it
be rendered intelligible. This will, I trust, have been effected in the
following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany
me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied
to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it the principles of
production and of genial criticism in the fine arts.

THESIS I

Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality
is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know
is in its very essence a verb active.

THESIS II

All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth
or truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its
formula A. A. ; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and
represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in A, is
attributable to B.

SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly
allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man
before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least
deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for
granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were
answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness
supplies the place of sight?

Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the
system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us,
that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious
act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing
the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the
cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc. ) as a continuous circle (A. ) giving to all
collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies,
by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders the
movement harmonious and cyclical.

THESIS III

We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of
communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself
borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own
light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it
is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate,
so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and
repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude
the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity.

THESIS IV

That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for
were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its
equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established,
as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by
the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal
antecedence in its very conception.

SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue)
is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of
a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the
definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself
is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. The same
reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable
truths exempted from the profane approach of philosophic investigation
by the amiable Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound
inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless
attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy
to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common sense into
reason.

THESIS V

Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it is
in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52]
thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless
triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object
which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable
without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum percipientem
supponit.

But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject,
contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid
objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object
nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is
conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor
object exclusively, but which is the identity of both.

THESIS VI

This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or
I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words
spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone,
object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving
and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes
a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but
which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the
very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as
a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and
subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses.

SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer,
sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been
admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be,
then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of
his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia Deus est, or
still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal
I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of
reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of
existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I am, because I
affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am.

THESIS VII

If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to
require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness.
Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required
identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the
essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this
be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality
of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit
in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this could
be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be
assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own
object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which
all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT;
for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of
any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally
the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this
identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But
this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence
or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The
self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed
as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.

THESIS VIII

Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily
finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and
as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot
originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming
an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be
conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most
original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the
recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of
production and life.
THESIS IX

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL,
or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle
of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the
ultimate science alone, i. e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it
must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the
two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly
confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far
as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its
opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of
our collective KNOWING, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity
of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and
accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception.
This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of
self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium
essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started
against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result
of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle
of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I
have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and the note
subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and
religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW
MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the
SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.

THESIS X

The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of
our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in
our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our
knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be some
thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that
the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of
all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any
thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the
form of all our knowing must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all
is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-
consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps
of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in
an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be
itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond
the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our
intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness,
does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us,
self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and
that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however be
shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when the
Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the
principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven
back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the
moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite
series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of
all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series
arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself
at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the
absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a
self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers
we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental
philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the
principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in
the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are
co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy
places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once
causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou--in the absolute
identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its
highest power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence.
In this sense the position of Malebranche, that we see all things in
God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion
of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all
real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but
vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself
revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction.

Makar, ilathi moi;
Pater, ilathi moi
Ei para kosmon,
Ei para moiran
Ton son ethigon!

Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not
a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree,
and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under
the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting
forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the
centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to
objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It
will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions
the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such
forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For
my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to
deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of
which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in
philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and
when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning
more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their
strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege beyond
the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the
scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather
to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance
multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of
correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence,
in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the
Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its
derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers.
It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice
or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there
already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is
no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance
with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined
words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect
conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is
under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics
in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and
the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon
for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern
philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is
representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced
within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum
irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur,
conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe
quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est
impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum
notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen
momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse
argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus
et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae
sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non
item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem,
(quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab
intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi
et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia
subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et
incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur,
pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]

Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important
fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of
spirits--(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of
the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand
the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the
philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a stronger
presumption against their own philosophic talent.

Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there
will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the
concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to
the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all
speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident
and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an
authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non
inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si
ingenia acuant et ordinent.

There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets
defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians;
some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the
mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity;
and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right
and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and
successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true
metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the
writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had
taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic
has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which
those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would
remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the
Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so
long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that
false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the
truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth
from which it may have been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a
plausible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing
that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This
alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an
indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and
faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget
each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men
rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss.
Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum
est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [55]

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I
must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of
Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new
edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient
with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article
contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs
of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human faculties) I
would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the
ear, the touch, etc. ; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic;
the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the
aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative,
substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis
theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to
produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means
of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty
of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will
and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to
include under the head of single and double touch. " To this, as far as
it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative
and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the
definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and
to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy. " I reply,
that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the
same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative,
I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I
am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work
with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in
the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But
it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary
to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or
permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination,
which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He
will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will
conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things
are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may
enjoy true peace and rest of spirit. " [57]




CHAPTER XIII

On the imagination, or esemplastic power


O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual! --give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive. [58]

"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere. "

"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
intelligibiliter explicari. " [59]

Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen. [60]


Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will
cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to
the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction
of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he
has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by
metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it,
as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles
of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the
metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge,
which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not
furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the
unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of
the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success
than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another
use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual
application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the
discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects.
Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the
questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed
by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he
well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection
of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid
cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in
motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a
motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the
same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that,
which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative
capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to
the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear
that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite
and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must
neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental
philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which
counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in
consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all
direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that
these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike
indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or
product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those
forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the
circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline
of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results,
by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to
elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively
this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting
forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration
gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own
self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution
itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for
whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic
no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest
perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must
be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception
is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an
inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.

* * * * * *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had
ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility
preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted
me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good
sense, but with less tact and feeling.

"Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
think it will make on the Public, i. e. that part of the public, who,
from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
your readers.

"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new
to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed
to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises
sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your
conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in
your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis
to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. In your own words, I
should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.

"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed,
and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty
moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often
in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then
suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows
of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic
symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work
images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked
upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all
I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had
been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect,
I found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while
the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar
with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed
substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were
deepened into substances:

If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either!

"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr.
Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:

------An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to
descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
required to see.

"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in
advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as
I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too
much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links,
from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may
recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps
of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least
one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers
will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which
cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages,
will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every
reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for
the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as
I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of
imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your
title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as
introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or
even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same
relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will
be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition
in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is
historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to
many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic
power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish
this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop
Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning
with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace.
I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have
devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in
its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both
its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who
feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have
themselves only to blame.

"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion
of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.

"Your affectionate, etc. "


In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find
at the close of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all
human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,
yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as
objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities
and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with,
and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express
by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must
receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.




CHAPTER XIV

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its
causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with
scholia.


During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over
a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested
itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems
might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents
were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed
at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic
truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,
supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every
human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time
believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class,
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was
agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should have
more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But
Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is
characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were
published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether
subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and
extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in
the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest,
which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the
second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which,
notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was
understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all
kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms
of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think,
adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From
this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the
presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might
be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the
conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the
inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious
passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the
assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
they were for a long time described as being had they been really
distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of
language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more
than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them;
they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion,
and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year
increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too
not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young
men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration
(inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its
intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts,
and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less
consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied,
meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at
their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself
have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round
and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed
to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never
concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in
principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other
parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the
greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent
collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end
of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he
has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic
creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy,
in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent
conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once
for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that
preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render
myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible,
explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in
kind, and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.
But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to
the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of
philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition;
the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of
them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to
the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.
It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial
arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is
distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly.
In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to
the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November," etc.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities,
all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
contents, may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form.